Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”—Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta

“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”—Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

• ISBN10: 0804139296
• ISBN13: 9780804139298
• Publish Date: 16 September 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Crown
• Imprint: Crown Currency
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780804139298

Reviews

[adamfortuna]

While reading Elon Musk's biography, he touches quite a bit on his time at Paypal, including working with Peter Thiel. When I realized Thiel also had a biography out, I knew it would be next.

This book leads with a question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?". When I heard this, I had to pause the audiobook and think this one through. Before I knew it, I'd been stewing on this question for over an hour!

The next biggest takeaway was the idea that the next "big thing" won't be a tweak on existing piece of software, but a completely new market. Bill Gates won the operating system money. Google the Search Engine market. Facebook the social network. It's better to dive into a new category than try to copy an existing one.